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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6410693" data-attributes="member: 6669384">I did mention that it was a horrible joke, didn't I?Still, even Snopes lists the standardization of rail gauge as "partly true", tracing American standards to the British manufacturers, and from America back to Britain.  And it does acknowledge that they built their first rail equipment based on standard carriages.  That there were some odd standards adopted in some places doesn't mean that the British standard didn't prevail.  Still, it presumes that there were "standard" carriages, and there weren't.  They all fit into a general range, because they had to fit the roads, but that was the only "standard" in place. The width of a load on a rail car isn't so much limited by tunnels, as SNOPES tries to dispute in a fairly weak straw-man argument, but by how closely the rail lines laid sets of rails side by side, both in high traffic corridors and in freight yards.  Too wide a load on a train would run the risk of hitting another train in passing.  So the standard is, no loads wider than the cars themselves.  And if you've ever seen a train platform, particularly modern passenger rail like subways, the cars come within inches of the platform.  No wide loads possible.Interesting to note that Russia, an area that Rome never conquered, used a narrow gauge for their rail lines.  But they did it on purpose, to ensure that invaders couldn't use the rails to easily ship troops, arms and equipment across the borders and into their country.It also acted to obstruct fast and efficient trade, of course.  Bad choice in the long run.As for the whole series though, Roman chariot to space shuttle?  Yeah, it's got way too many moving parts.  But that's what makes it funny. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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